Why I Write

When I was in 6th grade I typed, in all caps (and for some strange reason, red ink), a dreadful and woeful attempt at a book entitled “He Was My Best Friend, He Was My Brother.”  It was passed around the middle school lunchroom, page by page, to much acclaim.  It’s been buried in a box somewhere but bound to someday be discovered and donated to an archive where it will be known to be the oldest unfinished work of Gayle Saks.  It will fetch millions of dollars when it eventually goes up for auction, hundreds of years from now.

My friends from summer camp remember me in deep concentration as I scribbled in my diary on my top bunk bed.  Those diaries, from 4th grade through college are my time capsules and access to memories, both good and bad, that I would have forgotten otherwise.  The writing is atrocious but flings me back to the critical and mundane moments that make up my life.  Those will never be auctioned off, deemed to be too priceless to put a dollar amount on.

I hope my writing now is a bit beyond the level of a middle-schooler who wrote the equivalent of a terrible Lifetime movie.  Some of my pieces about my mother’s suicide and my work with substance abusers and inmates have reached far and wide, some have even gone viral, which I suppose is the modern-day equivalent of being passed around an elementary school cafeteria.

Thanks a million for reading.

Gayle